Dahlia Lithwick: Frank Ricci just wants ’special treatment’
So Judith Warner wailed about hatred of affluent, educated women spiralling out of control. Her evidence? None except her say-so and a single instance in which a professor at Montana State University was appropriately charged with child endangerment.
Here's the other side of that coin. Affluent, educated woman Dahlia Lithwick, who's a senior editor at Slate delivered up this gem (Slate, 7/10/09). It seems that the Senate Judiciary Committee intends to call Frank Ricci as a witness in the Sotomayor hearings. Ricci, you'll recall, was the named plaintiff in the much publicized "reverse discrimination" case recently decided in his favor by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In that case, Ricci was trying to get promoted by his employer, the New Haven, Connecticut fire department. He and other white firefighters took the test required for promotion and passed it. But African-Americans who took the same test failed. That presented the city with the possibility that it would be sued by the black firefighters due to the "disparate impact" of the test results. Faced with that prospect, the city tossed out the test results and Ricci and the other white firemen sued. The Supreme Court ruled that the city had acted wrongly in throwing out the test results.
Now, Sotomayor has made much of her ability to look past the strict dictates of the law to their real-world results. That is, she touts her ability to understand how her rulings affect people in their everyday lives. But Ricci begs to differ. Sotomayor after all ruled against him and the other plaintiffs at the federal appellate level. It was her court's decision that the Supreme Court overturned in Ricci's case.
(To be clear, given the state of the law at the time, the Second Circuit correctly ruled on Ricci's claims. The Supreme Court overruled that decision, but it changed applicable law in doing so.)
So the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are going to have Ricci come in and testify that, when the people of the real world who are affected by her decisions turn out to be white and male, Sotomayor's famous 'empathy' takes a day off.
And that's got Dahlia Lithwick's knickers in a knot. Why? Let's ask her.
According to Lithwick, Ricci has been "invariably painted as a reluctant standard bearer" for what she doesn't say. So one thing wrong with Ricci is that he fails to be what others have "painted" him to be. How he's responsible for other people's descriptions of him, she doesn't explain. If someone were to describe Dahlia Lithwick as the second coming of Albert Einstein, would she be deficient for failing to measure up? According to her, yes.
But that's not Lithwick's main gripe. She groped around and located a blogger who dared to claim that Ricci had "never once sought special treatment for his dyslexia..." Not true! shouted Lithwick. What sort of special treatment did Ricci seek when the City of Hartford fire department initially refused to hire him allegedly because of his dyslexia? He filed a lawsuit under the Americans With Disabilities Act and ... won. The City of Hartford settled with Ricci out of court, agreeing to employ him as a firefighter and pay his attorneys fees.
To Lithwick, Ricci's successful suit for discrimination based on his disability constitutes "special treatment." Uh, no it doesn't. Actually, seeking redress of grievances in civil court means that you're asking to be treated, not specially, but just like everyone else. In Ricci's case, he was asking to be treated just like any other applicant, which by the way, is what federal law requires.
So according to Judith Warner, when the police and prosecutor demanded that Bridget Kevane be treated as the law requires for her neglect of her children, that's a horrifying example of an attack on educated, affluent women. But when a not highly educated, working stiff like Frank Ricci seeks the equal protection of laws that were put in place to protect people like him, to Dahlia Lithwick, that's a horrifying demand for special treatment.
In short, according to them, equal treatment under law constitutes unacceptable abuse if you're an educated woman, and unacceptable privilege if you're a blue-collar man.
Here's my suggestion: the well-educated and affluent Judith Warner and the well-educated and affluent Dahlia Lithwick need to talk and get their stories straight.
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